Activities of the Strategic Partnership 'Diversity in the Cultures of Phyiscs'

The planned interventions will enable the network to establish collaborations in and beyond physics, including scholars from gender studies. Our work programme covers two main lines of action:

All partner universities are active in outreach events addressed to young people. In order to reach more young women, we seek to coordinate our strategies and prepare a transnational event. Exchange visits and workshops will allow us to develop a comparative approach of best practices in different national educational settings. During the project phase we will seek further collaborators from schools and universities from outside the partnership. Documentation consisting of teaching materials and presentations from the outreach events will be made transnationally available to students and teaching staff in secondary and higher education via the project website.

Design, organization and evaluation of a European summer school seriesfor aspiring PhD students, which will be held each year in tandem with changing partners. Key actors are the working groups in the physics departments of the participating universities together with regional research institutes, science policy and gender equality institutions. Essential to the summer school series is experiential reflection within the participating student peer group and the interdisciplinary collaboration of teachers. A sustainable network will be established through the ensuing mentoring and monitoring contacts.

Besides the curriculum development, a collection of lesson plans for “Gender Knowledge in Physics” will be an important transferable outcome of the second line of action. As the documentation on each summer school events and the final evaluation, they will be published online.

The creation of these resources has been (partially) funded by the ERASMUS+ grant program of the European Union under grant no. 2016-1-DE01-KA203-002918. Neither the European Commission nor the project's national funding agency DAAD are responsible for the content or liable for any losses or damage resulting of the use of these resources.